Month: August 2017

(Margaret Drive…hideaway in a small forgotten corner of the city…reading books in a library with a quiet view of leaves and grass…enjoying a late afternoon tea-time break from the books just two steps away at the oldest surviving food centre, munching on You Char Kway, Ham Chim Peng, Butterfly dough fritters, and washing it down with thick kopi and teh…watching the dust motes rise lazily in the waning golden light of the late afternoon sun…)

This old neighbourhood — made up of crumbling concrete blocks of first generation housing flats, the food centre and an old cinema, all earmarked for demolition+rebuilding and mostly abandoned and empty — was my refuge and haven for a period. Like the crumbling concrete structures themselves, I felt grey and hollow, cracked and empty. I was crumbling away inside, jagged pieces of me broken and chipped away. And without sinews of reinforced steel rebar, rusted or not.

The received wisdom in advanced capitalist societies is that there still exists an organic “civil society sector” in which institutions form autonomously and come together to manifest the interests and will of citizens. The fable has it that the boundaries of this sector are respected by actors from government and the “private sector,” leaving a safe space for NGOs and nonprofits to advocate for things like human rights, free speech, and accountable government.

This sounds like a great idea. But if it was ever true, it has not been for decades. Since at least the 1970s, authentic actors like unions and churches have folded under a sustained assault by free-market statism, transforming “civil society” into a buyer’s market for political factions and corporate interests looking to exert influence at arm’s length. The last forty years has seen a huge proliferation of think tanks and political NGOs whose purpose, beneath all the verbiage, is to execute political agendas by proxy.